Boys have more problem with 'legit' popups, ie, popups shown when they surf to sites. It's not just porn, either...look for warez, get porn popups.
Girls, OTOH, seems slightly more likely to fall for 'social' spyware. You know, 'install this for cute kitten icons' and stuff like that. So their porn popups happens without any relationship to web browsing.
Which is obviously much more embarassing. You aren't likely to search for stuff you know is going to give you porn popups in front of other people. But if you just get them randomly, that's a pretty serious problem.
I adblock pointless tracking gifs if I notice them. And any pointless javascript at all.
Granted, I don't go to adblock unless there's actually something I don't want, so I don't block them all. But if I'm there, I figure, what the hell, and adblock anything that isn't content, actual graphics, or code required to run the site.
I wondered if I should mention black box coding, or coding to spec, or whatever you want to call it.
In theory you can churns out little blocks of code that others put to together.
In reality, that's very difficult, and requires fundamental shifts in methodology and a complete rewrite of any existing project. And a very large investment at the start figuring everything out, which is near impossible.
Almost everyone who thinks they do that just fake it. There are probably a few modules with well-defined input and output, but trying to manage everything to that level, from the start, would require a year of work between design and implimentation. Hopefully something like that emerges organically, but having it from the start is different.
And all that does is shift your 'IP' up one level. Now the important thing is the amazingly well designed spec document. Yes, fewer people have access to it, but OTOH it's much easier to use if stolen, and it's not even copyright infringement, or at least not provable copyright infringement.
And it's still going to kill productivity. Programmers are going to spend all their time looking up exactly what other people's code is supposed to do, never quite knowing if the other code works correctly, and waiting forever for compiles, which they have to do remotely as they don't have the whole source tree, and thus can't do incrimentally...
There's no reason a company can't do these things too. Yes, it's a lot of work, and therefore expensive, and yes, it reduces productivity. Which is probably why most employers don't go to this much trouble, but it is possible, and probably done.
It doesn't reduce productivity, it destroys it. With the CIA, you can be working on, say, the IRA, and not actually need information about Quebec. (I switched to the CIA because I can actually make up examples...I don't know 90% of what the NSA does at all.)
If you're programming, either someone needed to create a hell of a lot of documentation, or you need to see code you're not directly working on. There's a difference between 'you only get one volume of the encyclopedia for the report you're writing' and 'you only get one quarter of the blueprint of the car you're designing'.
And a lot of the CIA's need-to-know works simply by honesty and auditing. People are expected not to learn things they don't need to know, and if they start doing a lot of research into things they don't need to know, auditors start looking closely. That takes a lot of resources and a very formal classification of data, along with very dedicated employees. (Which I'm suspecting is his problem, right there.).
Now, obviously, if something is in an entirely different project, you don't need to see that, but that, frankly, is obvious. If someone's worried about security and hasn't thought of that, they should just give up.
Military contractors get subject to the same scrutiny as the intelligent community. (Although obviously they do a lot less research through classifed data.) But this guy is in India, so I doubt he's a military contractor, and certainly not for the US military.
And, yeah, the reason so few source code thefts happen is that a) you'd get sued into the ground, along with b) source code is, sadly, still nowhere near as reusable as it should be, and c) sometimes it is stolen, and no one learns about it.
The NSA operates on a need-to-know basis where people can't access information they don't need even if they pass the classification level. And very few of them have write access to any data besides their specific responsiblity.
Plus, everyone with any access to classified data has had all sorts of security checks done, and signed away certain rights.
And, like you pointed out, the NSA can back up security with physical force. You run out of NSA with a hard drive, even assuming you make it past their security (Which is military), you'll have more law enforcement after you than if you just robbed a bank. However, you probably won't make it out of the building...they will just shoot you.
Whereas if someone runs out of a company with a hard drive...well, if the company runs really fast, maybe it can get a court order.
While the NSA can secure their information from employees, that's a long shot from companies being able to do so.
I'm not exactly sure what 'IP' we're talking about here, anyway. Didn't these programmers create the 'IP' in the first place? This question really doesn't make any sense.
And there was that other great TNG episode with time travel: Time's Arrow.
Yeah, the Mark Twain stuff was silly, but it's a great episode.
But almost all the other episodes forget the rule: No science in science fiction should ever be used as a solution, unless it is a) easily understandable, b) realistic, or c) has already been introduced, preferably as part of the problem.
You're saying Farscape had 'people-in-makeup' aliens?
Farscape had some of the most non-human and realistic (Instead of glowing lumps of rock) aliens you'll ever meet on TV.
Yes, 90% of their aliens were clearly people in masks, and that's budget issues, every TV show has that unless they want to spend a billion dollars an episode. (And they saved even more by cleverly making one major species 'human', the Peacekeepers.)
But every episode had, at minimum, Rigel and Pilot, who were, in fact, muppets. And the other major race was the Scarrans, most of whom, while people in costumes, had a protruding face that stuck out a good foot and half.
In fact, the whole damn series was created so the puppeteer people could show off their work. It has more 'non-human actors' screen time than any other live-action TV show ever made. (And, no, I'm not counting the ship.) And not cheesy CGI (For the characters, at least.), but very realistic puppets.
Yes, but on the other hand, on Firefly, almost all firefights were not on the ship.
Granted, some were, but that's not why they had guns...no one was supposed to get on the ship anyway. It's not like you could just stroll in.
In fact, the only person who boarded the ship against their will snuck on there, via shadowing them and an EVA. As far as we know, there is no commonly used 'hostile boarding procedure', and thus carrying guns around to protect against that would be stupid.
So if you're watching it thinking it's Star Trek and random people can beam onto your ship, sure, the guns are stupid. (Although slow slug-throwers aren't that dangerous.)
But on Firefly, worrying about people being on your ship is rather akin to worrying about people breaking into your airplane. It's silly and just going to kill you both if they try.
Even though this specific case of extortion involves private information threating to be made public, it's not blackmail, as the person being extorted is not the one towards who the information is damaging...they'd just be hurt because the release of the information would result in a PR nightmare, not because the public would know the content of the information.
I.e., if you're being blackmailed, you don't want the information out at all, whereas in this case they simple didn't want themselves traced to any leak, and could care less if people got the information from someone else. Hence it's a different kind of extortion, not blackmail.
However, many kinds of 'extortion' are legal. It depends one whether or not she had the legal right to release the information. Assuming there are no data privacy laws, the only thing forbidding it would be her contract, and the company broke the contract already by refusing to pay her, so she's certainly not obligated to follow it.
In fact, refusing to hold up your end of the contract when the other party refuses to hold up theirs only makes sense.
People who fake stuff don't have anything to do with child porn at all.
As for accidental downloading...either the cops know about it, and failed to stop this person, or they don't know about it and you need a multi-pass file wiper, quickly. (1)
I don't think the first is acceptable at all, and I think it happens a lot more than people suspect. Someone estimated that a large amount of child porn out there is for police stings, and I think that's idiotic. However, they don't misname it, that would never stand in court.
But this already happens. At least under my system, you just pay a fine, instead of being labeled a child molester for something you didn't do.
Anyway, police they shouldn't be distributing child porn at all. They should be trying to download and purchase it. The receipients are not important, it's the distributers who are assaulting children, or can lead them back to the people who are.
By removing some penalties for the receipients, I was actually trying to reduce incentive to frame people, or find people who have a usenet grabber that continually dumps a porn newsgroup in a directory for them to sort later. That's also why I specified that any fine should go to the specific children, or a general fund until the children are found. The cops then have no incentive to track down end users unless they can lead to bigger fish.
1) And let me just be frank here and mention that I once downloaded what I guess is 'little people' porn, which were deliberately dressed like children, as I was trying to find where Norton put my file wiper, I noticed they were not, in fact, children, which was quite a relief, although I wiped them anyway, as it was rather sickening.
No. Someone can always refuse to sell to you for almost any reason, barring the few forms of discrimination barred by law.
However, what they cannot do is refuse to accept legal tender as payments for debts. If, for example, you eat a meal, and that meal had the list price of '$23' dollars, you now have a 'private debt' of 23 dollars. (Plus tax, but in reality you don't owe them the tax, even thought they collect it for you.)
Federal law: 'United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.'
What does mean? Tender is anything you offer to pay anything. 'legal tender for debts' is just something that legally, is regarded as tender for all debts. (Duh.) They can legally require payment in sheep, and that's fine, but if they specify '$23' and have no more restrictions in it, cash is legal tender. So your offer of a thousand dollar bill is legal tender.
U.C.C. - ARTICLE 3 - NEGOTIABLE INSTRUMENTS , PART 6. DISCHARGE AND PAYMENT
3-603. TENDER OF PAYMENT.
(b) If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.
That's the UCC, so doesn't apply in every single state, but every state has something like that.
Note that while states can change that part of the law, they cannot change the Federal statue, and they can't define anything else except gold or silver as legal tender. (If the state didn't ahve something like that, banks could refuse your house payments and foreclose on your house, rightly insisting you hadn't paid the required amounts, and all sorts of surreal stuff.)
Anyway, if you attempt to pay off a debt in legal tender (Any legal tender at all.), and they refuse it, the matter is closed, at least for the amount you tried to pay. If you attempt to pay for your meal using enough legal tender, and they refuse, the matter is close. 'If tender...is made...and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender'.
Note they are under no legal obligation to make change for you.
You shouldn't do that, legally they could argue their debt was discharged when they attempted to pay you and you refused it. You cannot refuse legal tender for a debt unless stated in advance.
OTOH, if you tell them if they pay with a 100, you will only be able to give them 36 dollars back, and you would have to owe them the rest, you're legally covered.
Nothing requires you to have any money at all laying around, so if they don't pay in exact change, they're running the risk you will have to owe them money.
At least the 'lock the border' people are honest, if very stupid. The influx of dirt-poor hardworking people helps America, so locking them out is just dumb.
But it's a lot more honest than what we have going on now, where most people who winge about illegals go off on rants about income taxes and whatnot.
Here's a free clue: Almost none of those people make enough to pay income tax, and certainly not in any large amount, and they'd be happy to pay it.
What we need to do is take over Mexico. Yeah, I'm serious. Let's open the borders full, let everyone across for 500 dollars, which they have two years to pay off. Anyone already in the US gets the same deal.
But, and this is the key, we ask them to bring their whole families. No more sending money back home, you bring everyone here. (We can do some sort of tax incentive thing here.) We can build communities in, say, New Mexico (I don't think anyone uses that state, and the name works.) Instead of working in California and sending money to Mexico, they send it to New Mexico.
Plenty of land, plenty of food, everyone is happy. After ten years here they'll own an HDTV and be middle management at a carpet factory in New Mexico, where they hire new arrivals from Mexico. After thirty years their kids will be wearing their baseball caps backwards and not knowing how to speak Spanish, and doing embarassing well on their SATs.
In fifty years Mexico will be almost dead.
We politely make overtures towards them joining the US.
City tax? What city tax is there besides sales tax?
And illegal aliens do pay propery taxes, you lunatic. I can't even imagine how you think they wouldn't.
As for insurance...uninsuranced people drive the cost of car insurance up. Uninsuranced people drive the cost of health insurance up. Absolutely none of that has anything to do with their legality, it has to do if they're dirt-poor or not. Blaming the problems in health insurance and car insurance on them being here illegally is idiotic.
Income tax...you'd be amazed how many illegals get fake SS numbers and pay federal, state, and social security taxes through withholdings. Many for them pay too much and end up having a refund, which of course they can never collect. (Nor can they ever collect the social security they put in, even if they do become citizens.)
And, no, there are no risk-free channels to becoming a citizen. Drawing attention to yourself from the INS is a good way to be immediately deported.
And the ones that don't pay any taxes (instead of taxes on fake names) get paid less and probably would have been eligable for a refund at the end of the year anyway.
Anyone who thinks 'undocumented' aliens want to remain 'undocumented' is crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Girls, OTOH, seems slightly more likely to fall for 'social' spyware. You know, 'install this for cute kitten icons' and stuff like that. So their porn popups happens without any relationship to web browsing.
Which is obviously much more embarassing. You aren't likely to search for stuff you know is going to give you porn popups in front of other people. But if you just get them randomly, that's a pretty serious problem.
For those not paying attention: 1% is 4% of 20%. Hence 4% more people using Firefox than were using it before.
Granted, I don't go to adblock unless there's actually something I don't want, so I don't block them all. But if I'm there, I figure, what the hell, and adblock anything that isn't content, actual graphics, or code required to run the site.
If so, that's your middle button...you can click it.
In theory you can churns out little blocks of code that others put to together.
In reality, that's very difficult, and requires fundamental shifts in methodology and a complete rewrite of any existing project. And a very large investment at the start figuring everything out, which is near impossible.
Almost everyone who thinks they do that just fake it. There are probably a few modules with well-defined input and output, but trying to manage everything to that level, from the start, would require a year of work between design and implimentation. Hopefully something like that emerges organically, but having it from the start is different.
And all that does is shift your 'IP' up one level. Now the important thing is the amazingly well designed spec document. Yes, fewer people have access to it, but OTOH it's much easier to use if stolen, and it's not even copyright infringement, or at least not provable copyright infringement.
And it's still going to kill productivity. Programmers are going to spend all their time looking up exactly what other people's code is supposed to do, never quite knowing if the other code works correctly, and waiting forever for compiles, which they have to do remotely as they don't have the whole source tree, and thus can't do incrimentally...
It doesn't reduce productivity, it destroys it. With the CIA, you can be working on, say, the IRA, and not actually need information about Quebec. (I switched to the CIA because I can actually make up examples...I don't know 90% of what the NSA does at all.)
If you're programming, either someone needed to create a hell of a lot of documentation, or you need to see code you're not directly working on. There's a difference between 'you only get one volume of the encyclopedia for the report you're writing' and 'you only get one quarter of the blueprint of the car you're designing'.
And a lot of the CIA's need-to-know works simply by honesty and auditing. People are expected not to learn things they don't need to know, and if they start doing a lot of research into things they don't need to know, auditors start looking closely. That takes a lot of resources and a very formal classification of data, along with very dedicated employees. (Which I'm suspecting is his problem, right there.).
Now, obviously, if something is in an entirely different project, you don't need to see that, but that, frankly, is obvious. If someone's worried about security and hasn't thought of that, they should just give up.
Military contractors get subject to the same scrutiny as the intelligent community. (Although obviously they do a lot less research through classifed data.) But this guy is in India, so I doubt he's a military contractor, and certainly not for the US military.
And, yeah, the reason so few source code thefts happen is that a) you'd get sued into the ground, along with b) source code is, sadly, still nowhere near as reusable as it should be, and c) sometimes it is stolen, and no one learns about it.
Plus, everyone with any access to classified data has had all sorts of security checks done, and signed away certain rights.
And, like you pointed out, the NSA can back up security with physical force. You run out of NSA with a hard drive, even assuming you make it past their security (Which is military), you'll have more law enforcement after you than if you just robbed a bank. However, you probably won't make it out of the building...they will just shoot you.
Whereas if someone runs out of a company with a hard drive...well, if the company runs really fast, maybe it can get a court order.
While the NSA can secure their information from employees, that's a long shot from companies being able to do so.
I'm not exactly sure what 'IP' we're talking about here, anyway. Didn't these programmers create the 'IP' in the first place? This question really doesn't make any sense.
What the hell kind of crazy society is going on in India?
Well, it's not like you didn't know in advance.
Yeah, the Mark Twain stuff was silly, but it's a great episode.
But almost all the other episodes forget the rule: No science in science fiction should ever be used as a solution, unless it is a) easily understandable, b) realistic, or c) has already been introduced, preferably as part of the problem.
Farscape had some of the most non-human and realistic (Instead of glowing lumps of rock) aliens you'll ever meet on TV.
Yes, 90% of their aliens were clearly people in masks, and that's budget issues, every TV show has that unless they want to spend a billion dollars an episode. (And they saved even more by cleverly making one major species 'human', the Peacekeepers.)
But every episode had, at minimum, Rigel and Pilot, who were, in fact, muppets. And the other major race was the Scarrans, most of whom, while people in costumes, had a protruding face that stuck out a good foot and half.
In fact, the whole damn series was created so the puppeteer people could show off their work. It has more 'non-human actors' screen time than any other live-action TV show ever made. (And, no, I'm not counting the ship.) And not cheesy CGI (For the characters, at least.), but very realistic puppets.
No, that's not taunting. Taunting would be playing coy, acting like they might pick or sci-fi series or continue them, maybe, maybe not...
Fox is more...a boot stamping on a human face. Forever.
Granted, some were, but that's not why they had guns...no one was supposed to get on the ship anyway. It's not like you could just stroll in.
In fact, the only person who boarded the ship against their will snuck on there, via shadowing them and an EVA. As far as we know, there is no commonly used 'hostile boarding procedure', and thus carrying guns around to protect against that would be stupid.
So if you're watching it thinking it's Star Trek and random people can beam onto your ship, sure, the guns are stupid. (Although slow slug-throwers aren't that dangerous.)
But on Firefly, worrying about people being on your ship is rather akin to worrying about people breaking into your airplane. It's silly and just going to kill you both if they try.
I don't see anything morally wrong with threatening to release the data.
It is somewhat extreme and should obviously be a last resort, though.
Unless you're going to provide super-powered transmitters to everyone.
Hopefully some sort of tort reform so it's harder to sue these honest, hardworking companies!
Why the hell would corporations pass that law?
Even though this specific case of extortion involves private information threating to be made public, it's not blackmail, as the person being extorted is not the one towards who the information is damaging...they'd just be hurt because the release of the information would result in a PR nightmare, not because the public would know the content of the information.
I.e., if you're being blackmailed, you don't want the information out at all, whereas in this case they simple didn't want themselves traced to any leak, and could care less if people got the information from someone else. Hence it's a different kind of extortion, not blackmail.
However, many kinds of 'extortion' are legal. It depends one whether or not she had the legal right to release the information. Assuming there are no data privacy laws, the only thing forbidding it would be her contract, and the company broke the contract already by refusing to pay her, so she's certainly not obligated to follow it.
In fact, refusing to hold up your end of the contract when the other party refuses to hold up theirs only makes sense.
As for accidental downloading...either the cops know about it, and failed to stop this person, or they don't know about it and you need a multi-pass file wiper, quickly. (1)
I don't think the first is acceptable at all, and I think it happens a lot more than people suspect. Someone estimated that a large amount of child porn out there is for police stings, and I think that's idiotic. However, they don't misname it, that would never stand in court.
But this already happens. At least under my system, you just pay a fine, instead of being labeled a child molester for something you didn't do.
Anyway, police they shouldn't be distributing child porn at all. They should be trying to download and purchase it. The receipients are not important, it's the distributers who are assaulting children, or can lead them back to the people who are.
By removing some penalties for the receipients, I was actually trying to reduce incentive to frame people, or find people who have a usenet grabber that continually dumps a porn newsgroup in a directory for them to sort later. That's also why I specified that any fine should go to the specific children, or a general fund until the children are found. The cops then have no incentive to track down end users unless they can lead to bigger fish.
1) And let me just be frank here and mention that I once downloaded what I guess is 'little people' porn, which were deliberately dressed like children, as I was trying to find where Norton put my file wiper, I noticed they were not, in fact, children, which was quite a relief, although I wiped them anyway, as it was rather sickening.
However, what they cannot do is refuse to accept legal tender as payments for debts. If, for example, you eat a meal, and that meal had the list price of '$23' dollars, you now have a 'private debt' of 23 dollars. (Plus tax, but in reality you don't owe them the tax, even thought they collect it for you.)
Federal law: 'United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.'
What does mean? Tender is anything you offer to pay anything. 'legal tender for debts' is just something that legally, is regarded as tender for all debts. (Duh.) They can legally require payment in sheep, and that's fine, but if they specify '$23' and have no more restrictions in it, cash is legal tender. So your offer of a thousand dollar bill is legal tender.
U.C.C. - ARTICLE 3 - NEGOTIABLE INSTRUMENTS , PART 6. DISCHARGE AND PAYMENT
3-603. TENDER OF PAYMENT.
(b) If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.
That's the UCC, so doesn't apply in every single state, but every state has something like that. Note that while states can change that part of the law, they cannot change the Federal statue, and they can't define anything else except gold or silver as legal tender. (If the state didn't ahve something like that, banks could refuse your house payments and foreclose on your house, rightly insisting you hadn't paid the required amounts, and all sorts of surreal stuff.)
Anyway, if you attempt to pay off a debt in legal tender (Any legal tender at all.), and they refuse it, the matter is closed, at least for the amount you tried to pay. If you attempt to pay for your meal using enough legal tender, and they refuse, the matter is close. 'If tender...is made...and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender'.
Note they are under no legal obligation to make change for you.
OTOH, if you tell them if they pay with a 100, you will only be able to give them 36 dollars back, and you would have to owe them the rest, you're legally covered.
Nothing requires you to have any money at all laying around, so if they don't pay in exact change, they're running the risk you will have to owe them money.
But it's a lot more honest than what we have going on now, where most people who winge about illegals go off on rants about income taxes and whatnot. Here's a free clue: Almost none of those people make enough to pay income tax, and certainly not in any large amount, and they'd be happy to pay it.
What we need to do is take over Mexico. Yeah, I'm serious. Let's open the borders full, let everyone across for 500 dollars, which they have two years to pay off. Anyone already in the US gets the same deal.
But, and this is the key, we ask them to bring their whole families. No more sending money back home, you bring everyone here. (We can do some sort of tax incentive thing here.) We can build communities in, say, New Mexico (I don't think anyone uses that state, and the name works.) Instead of working in California and sending money to Mexico, they send it to New Mexico.
Plenty of land, plenty of food, everyone is happy. After ten years here they'll own an HDTV and be middle management at a carpet factory in New Mexico, where they hire new arrivals from Mexico. After thirty years their kids will be wearing their baseball caps backwards and not knowing how to speak Spanish, and doing embarassing well on their SATs.
In fifty years Mexico will be almost dead. We politely make overtures towards them joining the US.
No more illegal immigration.
And illegal aliens do pay propery taxes, you lunatic. I can't even imagine how you think they wouldn't.
As for insurance...uninsuranced people drive the cost of car insurance up. Uninsuranced people drive the cost of health insurance up. Absolutely none of that has anything to do with their legality, it has to do if they're dirt-poor or not. Blaming the problems in health insurance and car insurance on them being here illegally is idiotic.
Income tax...you'd be amazed how many illegals get fake SS numbers and pay federal, state, and social security taxes through withholdings. Many for them pay too much and end up having a refund, which of course they can never collect. (Nor can they ever collect the social security they put in, even if they do become citizens.)
And, no, there are no risk-free channels to becoming a citizen. Drawing attention to yourself from the INS is a good way to be immediately deported.
Anyone who thinks 'undocumented' aliens want to remain 'undocumented' is crazy.